Short video of the OLPC UI action

November 21, 2006

The makezine blog has a great guide on how to try out the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) system yourself on Windows, but if you cant be bothered, I have put together a video clip of the OLPC UI in action. I’m amazed to see how unusual the UI is. Apps are full-screen by default, and the black border shown around the sides (see screen grab) is a menu that pops over the content when you move your cursor to the side of the screen. And that’s just the start of it…

It’s really not what I expected at all- I have opinions about interface familiarity and transferable skills… What do you think? Please post your comments!

6 comments

My first feeling is ‘yuk!’. It feels a bit like a walled garden. What’s the age group it’s aimed at?

I know a lot of innovative thinking went into it so I intend to play with it some more. I think it’s dangerous to hide too much complexity as you’ll get your feet wet with leaky abstractions. I think hiding the URL in the web browser is an example of one abstraction too far.

I linked to the source for the phrase ‘leaky abstraction’ in the comment. It’s a nice metaphor coined by Joel Spolksy who writes a wonderfully readable blog on software development and the industry in general.

Here’s my take on it. Abstractions are intended to hide complexity from the user. You don’t need to know about frequencies to change the channel on a TV. You don’t need to know about HTML to author web pages in FrontPage. Unfortunately for any system of reasonable complexity (i.e. any software) these abstractions are usually incomplete. And they usually break down at the point of highest complexity i.e. when you need them the most.

So in many cases abstractions can make things harder for the end user by adding another layer on top of an existing system where in some cases just using the underlying system would have been easier to comprehend than system+imperfect abstraction.

My first impression is that this was a really bad decision. But why start with Fedora? Cutting down a full-size distro seems like the wrong approach to me, I’d have built up from LFS or one of the really minimal liveCD’s like Puppy or Feather.

Why a whole new desktop? I’m sure I could do 90% of what sugar does just by adding a few sidebars and configuring XFCE nicely. Why cut the applications down like that? Is an application menu or an address bar in firefox really so confusing when one-button access to the underlying program code is not?

The hardware is brilliant. I’ve run xubuntu on slower machines and it’s perfectly adequate. The software I’m not sure yet. Hopefully it feels quite different when it’s running on the actual hardware with, but on the emulator it’s too much like just another educational toy..

the only thing I can say about that with conviction is that getting rid of the address bar is a bad move. If I tell someone my website is bluebottleimages.org, its much easier for them to type bluebottleimages.org in the address bar than to try to google it and sift through all the results (which I think are mostly sub-pages and files when you google mine).

Otherwise, it looks alright. One of the main purposes of it is to connect kids to each other via the internet, right? Have kids in different places in the world talking to each other, playing together etc. I think it’ll do that.